Google backslides on federated instant messaging, on purpose?

Google users can still send subscription requests to contacts whose
accounts are hosted elsewhere. But they cannot accept incoming
requests. This change is akin to Google no longer accepting incoming
e-mail for @gmail.com addresses from non-Google domains. That would be
unthinkable.

Earlier this year, we announced an instant messaging service for our
members
using Jabber (XMPP). This service is federated, so like email, you can
talk to people whose account is hosted somewhere else than the FSF.
Your account is, say, johns@member.fsf.org, but you could still
seamlessly talk to someone who is sergey@gmail.com.

Until now. Recently, some of our members started reporting that they
were no longer able to add contacts at GoogleTalk, which is the Jabber
service Google provides to Gmail users. Since Google has run a fully
federated Jabber service for a long time and ours is new, we
investigated under the assumption the problem was on our end.

Turns out, Google has started blocking invites sent from non-Google
Jabber servers. Subscription requests just disappear mysteriously,
confusing both users and server operators.

Google users can still send subscription requests to contacts whose
accounts are hosted elsewhere. But they cannot accept incoming
requests. This change is akin to Google no longer accepting incoming
e-mail for @gmail.com addresses from non-Google domains. That would be
unthinkable.

According to a public mailing list thread,
Google is doing this on purpose, to handle a spam problem. We
sympathize; we spend a disappointing amount of energy combating
similar problems on the services we provide for the free software
community. But the solution can't be something that breaks legitimate
communication channels, and especially not in a way that enhances
Google's disproportionate control of the network. While Google is
offering to whitelist servers whose operators write to them, this just
accentuates the inequality and doesn't realistically solve the
problem.

We hope that Google will retract this change and find a solution that
does not undermine the distributed nature of the Internet. We have
already reached out to them toward this end.

Meanwhile, we will continue offering our Jabber server as part of our
commitment to the vision of the Internet as a place of free
federation. You can join the FSF as a member and
start using yourname@member.fsf.org anytime.